We Need to Talk About Men

It’s 2002. I’m in my senior year of high school and have been selected to present at a statewide conference for Massachusetts educators. I am on a panel with two professional staff and another student, a young man from another high school. Because of our busy schedules, the professional staff met with each of us separately before today’s workshop to help us prepare. Other than exchanging quick hello’s, we do not know each other.

We were there to represent an organization we are both involved in within our respective schools. The program, Mentors in Violence Prevention (MVP), uses a bystander intervention approach to preventing men’s violence against women. We have both been trained to facilitate workshops to our peers and middle school students, and we have been selected to present at this conference because we are both skilled and confident facilitators. 

The professional staff begin the workshop by introducing themselves. They turn to me, and I rattle off the quick introduction I have shared in dozens of workshops before. “Hi, my name is Jessica and I’m a senior at Newton North High School. I got involved with MVP because I am a survivor of sexual assault and I want to help prevent this from happening to other young people.” I then turn to my teen counterpart so he can do his quick introduction and kick off our first activity. But he is frozen. He is staring at me and not moving, not saying a word. As someone who had done a lot of musical theater in my childhood, it reminded me of when a fellow actor would get stage fright and forget their lines. I began to rack my brain for how I could prompt him for what he was supposed to say when it hit me- he was only supposed to introduce himself. How could he forget his own name? So we stared at each other for what felt like a very long and uncomfortable silence until he shook his head, as if waking from a trance, and began talking to me, as though we were the only two people in the room.

“Wow, thank you for saying that,” he said. “I didn’t know you were sexually assaulted. I’m really sorry that happened to you. It means a lot to me that you said that. I’m a survivor, too, and I’ve never told anyone before.” He then went on to share his story and told me, and everyone in that room, that he had been sexually assaulted when he was 5 years old by a family member.

I never saw that young man again. And I can’t project or try to imagine what that day meant for him. What I can say is that it changed my life. I had started doing violence prevention work because of my own experience. When I was introduced to a framework that focuses on men’s violence against women, it fit with my own lived experience and, at 15 years old, I didn’t question it. I fell in love with the work because it was a way of taking the worst thing that had happened to me and transforming it into something meaningful. I don’t know what specifically motivated this young man to join the same club at his high school, but I don’t think it’s a coincidence that he had a personal connection to sexual violence. Yet, where I found a platform to share my story, he was unable to articulate his own because it didn’t fit the framework we were using. He was not a woman assaulted by a man. He had been a young boy when he was assaulted. And he had been suffering in shame and isolation for 13 years before he was able to finally tell someone- or in this case, a room full of strangers- what he had experienced. 

What I learned that day is that by not explicitly acknowledging male survivors, we were increasing their shame and suffering. Years later, I heard a district attorney, who was representing a group of men who had been sexually assaulted as children, say that the majority of the damage that was inflicted was not by the event itself, but rather by how long this secret had to be held. 

When we have been harmed and we do not have a safe outlet to express our pain, we are more likely to hurt others and/or to hurt ourselves. Boys and men are often socialized not to talk about their feelings, not to cry, or seek support. Years later I had a male student share, “I only have two feelings. I’m either happy or I’m pissed.” Many young men are given explicit and implicit messages that if they’ve been hurt the only acceptable emotion is anger. And where does that anger go? 

More than a decade after that conference I received a phone call from a probation officer I knew well while working at a rape crisis center. She had a new young man on her caseload, a junior in high school. In his file she discovered that he had recently disclosed to a friend that he had been sexually assaulted when he was a young child. When she interviewed him she learned that he had been brought to the hospital soon after his assault because of his physical injuries but he managed to tell a convincing lie because his perpetrator had told him that if he told anyone that he had been raped, his mother would be killed. At 5 years old this child believed he had to lie and hide his pain to protect his family. 

This probation officer asked this young man to meet with me for some confidential sexual assault counseling. “I told him,” she said on our phone call, “if this happened to my son I’d want him to talk to you.” I worked with this young man for months. While we got along instantly, it took him a long time to trust me. I asked him once if sexual assault had ever been discussed in any of his health and wellness classes in middle or high school. “Yes,” he said. “We talked about it. But whenever it came up it was always “she” the victim and “he” the perpetrator. And I’m not a “she.” So it didn’t really apply to me… and I’d just kind of tune out.” 

Months into our work together, the armor he had been wearing for so long slowly began to chip away. In one of our last sessions he asked me tearfully, “Is what he did to me… does it make me less of a man?” 

This was a question I had been asked by almost every single male survivor I had worked with- regardless of their age, race, socio-economic status… almost every single one of them feared that if they acknowledged their victimization they would lose their identity as a man. The assault had already taken control away from them, they did not want to lose their identity, as well. By only talking about sexual assault survivors as women, we are reinforcing the idea that this cannot happen to men. So what are they to think when it does? 

If we want to make strides in prevention, we have to explicitly acknowledge that all genders can experience sexual and domestic violence. In fact, the statistics of sexual violence towards trans and non-binary people are staggeringly high; in a study done by the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law they found that transgender people were four times as likely to experience violent victimization, including rape and sexual assault, as cisgender people. We have to hold ourselves accountable if we are creating harm and silencing survivors by upholding a gender binary when working to prevent gender-based violence. We have to examine how the standards of traditional masculinity harm everyone, including men. 

In a recent workshop with high school students I shared this Ted Talk entitled, “Reimagining masculinity; my journey as a male sexual assault survivor.” In it, Landon Wilcok shares, “We must resist using phrases like, “Man Up” or “Be a Man” when the men in our lives show vulnerability. And instead, tell our sons, brothers, and boyfriends that sensitivity is strength and vulnerability is power.” 

If you are a school or organization looking to strengthen your approach to violence prevention, schedule a consultation with us today. We can facilitate workshops with your colleagues or students that allow them to feel seen and heard.